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White Hot Rage

The most surprising thing about Michael Kimmel’s new book Angry White Men is that the title was still available. We’ve been hit by wave after wave of angry white dudes for decades, from the so-called “silent majority” of the seventies incensed by “forced busing” and braless “women’s libbers,” to your Tea Partier brother-in-law who’s always forwarding terrible jokes about Obama being born in Kenya.

Largely ignoring Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck fans to focus on more extreme examples of angry white manhood, Kimmel, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an influential writer on masculinity, devotes chapters to such charming folks as white supremacists, domestic abusers, and guys who “snap” and shoot up their schools and workplaces. Kimmel does an excellent job in explaining the whys and wherefores of racist skinheads and violent men and manages to write about some pretty damaged and hateful men with a remarkable degree of empathy. But he doesn’t ever get a firm grip on the most zeitgeisty of our zeitgeist’s angry white men: the men’s rights activists. As the proprietor of a blog devoted to chronicling (and mocking) misogyny online, I’ve spent the past three years tracking this aggrieved fringe group, which claims that in our binary gender system, it is men who have gotten the short shrift.

Let’s look first at what he gets right.

Why are so many white men so angry these days? Put simply, they’ve been knocked off their pedestal. While it’s a bit premature, to say the least, to talk about “the end of men” a la Hanna Rosin, who in a well-known Atlanticarticle declared that “the modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” it’s clear that things have changed dramatically since the days of Don Draper. Economically, we’re seeing the beginning of the end of what Kimmel calls “the single greatest affirmative action program in world history. It’s called 'world history.’” Women, while still paid less than men, have seen their salaries and job opportunities increase dramatically in recent decades—while men have seen their wages stagnate in real terms. With significantly more women than men graduating from college, this trend is not likely to reverse itself.

Instead of looking at the real source of their economic woes—government policies that favor the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us—ordinary white guys have lashed out instead at those below them in the social hierarchy: women and minorities.

It’s the end of what Kimmel calls “the era of unquestioned and unchallenged male entitlement.” This leads to a particularly bitter form of anger that Kimmel calls “aggrieved entitlement.” Add in a nasty economic downturn and an uncertain recovery and you have the perfect recipe for a backlash. “White men’s anger is ‘real’—that is, it is experienced deeply and sincerely," Kimmel writes. “But it is not ‘true’—that is, it doesn’t provide an accurate analysis of their situation.” Instead of looking toward what Kimmel sees as the real source of their economic woes—government policies that favor the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us—ordinary white guys have lashed out instead at those below them in the social hierarchy: women and minorities.

This isn’t the first time white men have felt under siege. At the turn of the 20th century, elite American men faced a crisis of masculine confidence. This was perhaps, as Kimmel points out, an inevitable response to the rapid rise of industrial capitalism—a dynamic but destabilizing force that made fortunes overnight but could also take them away in swift downturns. The slums of the cities filled with darker-skinned immigrants. Newspapers printed cartoons of “new women” in bloomers riding bicycles. Elite men, meanwhile, were sending themselves off on African safaris and to Western “dude ranches” in hopes of turning themselves back into real manly men. By the early decades of the 20th century, much of this uneasiness had trickled down to ordinary white Americans and taken an increasingly nativist turn. Cue a massive resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s as white Protestant men shored up their own masculinity at the expense of Catholics and darker-skinned “others.”

There’s a direct line between the anger and the uneasiness of Klansmen in the ’20s and the white supremacists of today. The proud racists that Kimmel interviewed for his book are models of “aggrieved entitlement”; mostly downwardly mobile, lower-middle class men, these discontents see themselves as hardworking providers who’ve had the rug pulled out from under them. But instead of aiming their anger at the one percent, they instead rail against imaginary Jewish conspiracies and a government they see as beholden to lazy, immoral minorities and other “degenerates.”

Men’s rights activists are harder to explain. They don’t fit as easily into Kimmel’s basic argument on the rise of male anger, heavily driven by the economic transformations and upheavals of recent decades. The men’s rights movement, for those who have yet to encounter it, has little in common with the so-called “mythopoetic” men’s movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which gathered in drum circles in the woods to reclaim their primal masculinity, poet Robert Bly at their helm. Its real roots lie in the anti-feminist backlash of the early ’90s, with ex-feminist Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power as its Bible. Deftly inverting the feminist narrative, Farrell declared that it was men, not women, who were the dispossessed, a “disposable sex” forced to fight the wars and take on the most dangerous jobs to protect and provide for women.

Men’s rights activists have latched onto the rhetoric of male victimhood, but designated feminists as the enemy.

Men’s rights activists have latched onto this rhetoric of male victimhood, but unlike Farrell, they have designated feminists as the enemy. The causes they take up—from false rape accusations to male abuse victims—often seem like little more than excuses to bash women in general, but especially feminists. Men’s rights activists don’t organize marches; they don’t build shelters or raise funds for abused men; they don’t organize prostate cancer-awareness events or campaign against prison rape. What they actually do, when they’re not simply carping in comments online, is target and harass women—from feminist writers and professors to activists—in an attempt to silence them. Paul Elam, the founder of the website A Voice for Men and probably the most influential men’s rights activist out there, once wrote to a critic: “Your only real hope is to keep your mouth shut ... We are coming for you, and we are coming for all the liars out there that have been ruining people’s lives with impunity.”

Indeed, A Voice for Men has set up its own “offenders registry” where it lists feminist “bigots” alongside female murderers and child abusers; the so-called bigots include several well-known feminist bloggers, college students who had the misfortune of being photographed by men’s rights activists at a feminist protest, and Katherine Heigl—yes, that Katherine Heigl—who won her “bigot” ranking for joking about being obsessed with cutting off men’s balls in a public-service announcement urging pet owners to spay and neuter their animals. Men’s rights activists have gone after feminist cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, who has endured a year and a half of abuse, including rape and death threats, after launching a video series critiquing sexism in video games. They have assailed Rebecca Watson, an atheist blogger who found herself the target of online misogyny after she complained in a video about being hit on in an elevator at 4 a.m. “Tech evangelist" Adria Richards aroused the ire of misogynists in the tech world after she tweeted about a sexist joke she overheard at a conference.

In his chapters on other movements of angry white men, Kimmel does a deft job of placing these groups within a larger historical narrative. He shows how the racist anger of white male supremacists has arisen in a climate of white male wage stagnation. He connects the father’s rights movement to transformations in our notions of fatherhood that have come about as more women have entered the workforce (and as feminists have challenged traditional gender roles).

Abusers lash out when they are challenged, when they feel insecure about their masculine authority.

But Kimmel’s explanation for the men’s rights movement—a bit of economic disenfranchisement here, a bit of unfair divorce law there, mixed with the disinhibiting effects of the Internet—is cobbled together and unconvincing. Ironically, he’s got a pretty good explanation of the men’s rights movement hiding in his insightful and disturbing chapter on domestic abusers. As Kimmel notes, abusers lash out when they are challenged, when they feel most insecure about their masculine authority. For them, Kimmel writes, “[v]iolence is restorative, retaliatory .... When [their] sense of entitlement is aggrieved, they don’t just get mad, they get even.” At its root, the men’s rights movement is driven by the same logic of abuse.

The rhetoric of men’s rights activists is steeped in the notion of “restorative, retaliatory” violence. Elam once wrote to one opponent that “the thought of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.” (You may recall Jaclyn Friedman’s report on her encounter with Elam at the Prospect.) In another post, he fantasized about replacing Domestic Violence Awareness Month with “Bash a Violent Bitch Month”:

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.

And then make them clean up the mess.

Though nearly as virulent in their hatred as the white supremacists, the men’s rights activists don’t seem to feel the same sense of economic dispossession. Many are young, in college or in their twenties, and (at least in my own encounters with them) they seem to be heavily concentrated in male-dominated science, technology, engineering, or math fields. They are, in other words, some of the men least affected by the so-called “end of men” that you can find.

What they are reacting to, I think, is more of a cultural dethroning of male entitlement. Over the last several decades, largely as a result of feminist activism, we’ve seen a dramatic change in attitudes toward and laws about date rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. We’ve also, not coincidentally, seen significant drops in all of these things. But what these changes have meant is a curtailment of certain kinds of male behavior that used to be considered normal. Men have to think twice before making crude sexual jokes in front of female coworkers; they can’t take advantage of women incapacitated by drink and pretend they don’t know it was rape. And all this makes some men furious.

Men’s rights activists like to pretend that their small movement is on the verge of transforming the world. But it’s clear their cries of rage are the last gasps of men furious that the world has changed underneath them. As Kimmel notes, “our choice is simple: we can either be dragged kicking and screaming into [a] future of greater equality and therefore greater freedom for all, or we can go with the tide.”

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What a competitive response with your use of the word "flatter."
Men have been flattered for too long and for the wrong reasons -- that's why the world is in trouble.
Men who lack competence and compassion do not know how to work with diverse people well because of their arrogance and sense of entitlement. Not a good combination,

wow, feminists are so full of themselves. You speak in such generalities, as if YOU know who has been "flattered" and YOU decide who should and who should not be flattered. I always say, you can't have feminism without a good bit of hypocrisy and self pity, and "fannie" has both in spades.

Always amazing to see what self styled eggheads can conjure up after willfully blinding themselves to certain things. Did they consider perhaps the only group considered acceptable to discriminate against might be the group that is enraged?

Reasonable people, some of whom are white men, are appropriately disgusted with the Sodom and Gomorrah America has become, that D.C. has become Versailles, and that political correctness and megaphone minorities have the lunatics running the asylum. These contrarians have no interest in being on a pedestal they just want liberty and justice for all. Those elements are not here when, e.g., a photographer w/ religious beliefs that do not accept gay marriages is subject to criminal penalties for refusing to do a gay wedding (they could have gone to another photographer, after all) while a gay hairdresser advocates a boycott of providing services to the governor of New Mexico because her religious beliefs (and her political beliefs would be enough) does not accept gay marriage and suffers no approbation at all. This is crazy. People like you are fascists who want to have liberty and justice only for those of whom you approve.

Don't mix your homophobia and religious crap with American liberty and justice. If you have a public business like I do a grocery store, I CAN'T not serve someone because they are a Christian any more than I could if they were black, period. This IS America and bigotry of your kind, are thank GOD, on the wane. There is too much anti male sentiments in America right now, illegal immigration is a huge problem and I am totally against their amnesty, but attacking fellow Americans who happen to be gay is pure hate and un-American. You want to practice that crap in YOUR church go right ahead, but keep it out of the public sphere. I am against feminism because it has become anti-male, male bashing, if it were just for equality I would be all for it, but it is not. Please not mix your variety of hate with an important message being talked about here today.

Speaking as a fifty-something white male I have no problem whatsoever with "our age" and think the "protest movement" is a fiction of the writer's imagination concocted to sell books. I tell my son that the philosophy that served me well will work just as well for him- Don't expect help from anyone, don't make excuses, and there is always room at the top.

Don't speak "for us all", not all of us share your beliefs. Always makes me laugh when I hear the right so concerned about "Sharia Law", and yet they have no problem pushing Christianity. Seems we know who feminists learned hypocrisy from. There are many valuable lessons in the Bible, too bad you did not pick one of them.

True on both points, what gets me most though is how these sites act as if only men are republicans, and on the extreme right. They act as if women may only have one view, theirs, they don't see the hypocrisy in their statements...that of course is no surprise.

Like Kimmel and all other ideological feminists, you suffer from the apex fallacy despite your nod to the "little guys." "The apex fallacy is the idea that we use the most visible members of a group to make generalizations about the entire group; i.e., we see prominent men at the top of the pyramid and think all men are doing well, when in fact there are a great many at the bottom of the pyramid, too." -Alison Beard, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2013/03/whats_worse_glass_ceilings_or_glass_cellars.html

Surely you could have said more about Warren Farrell and his work and influence. But no, you undoubtedly are a male basher trying to please women. You remind me of some of the blacks in the Deep South in the '50s who put down other blacks to gain whites' approval.

"Open Letter to Senate Judiciary on the VAWA"
http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/open-letter-to-senate-judiciary-on-the-vawa/

The Sexual Harassment Quagmire: How To Dig Out
http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/the-sexual-harassment-quagmire/

Please be sitting down when you read them.

One thing I know: you can never change your views, because you have long put them out, and to change is to say "I was wrong." And you are unable to say that because of what you think it would do to your reputation. So your fear of being wrong makes you dig your heels in to be "right."

My friend you are trying to educate the ignorant, good luck with that. Feminists are not interested in understanding, for them it is a one way street, anything else is pure "misogamy". The last thing they want to look at is their own extreme generalizations and subsequent hypocrisy.

what a bunch of idiotic drivel. why don't you report on the "knockout game", currently being perpetrated, along racial and religious lines, by gangs of black teenagers against innocent victims? maybe that's a more credible and relevant expose on "rage" right now, you idiotic hack. whit e men, if anything, are sick of being the butt of your racist/gender based bigotry. ____ ___, man, how's that for "angry"?

So let me see if I understand this right.
Girls today are 85% of Valedictorians, 60% of college students, more than 50% of the workforce, and women in their 20's now out earn men.

So, If a White woman believes she's being discriminated against not landing a job because she's a woman, she's completely justified because men rule.
If a White man believes he's being discriminated against not landing a job because he's a man, he's completely unjustified being an angry White male.

I wanted to be the first to say "great article", Michael - it's already so popular in my feminist FB groups, that people are posting it multiple times. Love manboobz - keep up the great work!! - Lilithe

Read the two comments of mine that TAP moderated away from you and ask:

+ Did Futrelle prove his point honestly, or is it clear he distorted truths?
+ What was so awful about my comments that TAP editors felt it necessary to delete them?
+ What else on so many other issues have TAP editors kept from you?

I have visited a number of MRA sites, including A Voice For Men and others, and read numerous articles and hundreds of comments, and my impression of MRA's is that many of them -- maybe not all, but many -- are scary angry. Are there some real issues that deserve attention? (prison rape, male domestic violence, unfair child support) -- absolutely yes. But those important messages seem to be drowned out by all the angry angry men complaining that women should get back in the kitchen and the bedroom and shut the f*ck up. It would be comical if it wasn't so sad and scary.

A lot of MRAs are angry. A lot of feminists claim to find any anger unacceptable and use the anger issue as a way to dismiss MRA claims.

Visit girlwriteswhat's http://www.youtube.com/user/girlwriteswhat youtube channel and watch one or two of her videos.

This would be good one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9G9AAhlMo4
Angry misogynists!
Why are MRAs so angry? Why are they so extreme? Why all the harsh language

I encourage you to visit the following sites, or better, place them on your feed reader for a week, read the articles that seem interesting, and the post on a blog, or twitter, or facebook, about what you found:

* cotwa.info - community of the wrongly accused - false accusations
* nationalparentsorganization.org / blog - national parenting organization - a shared parenting perspective (fathers and custody issues)
* womenformen.org - "imploding the myth of the expendable male"
* avoiceformalestudents.com - educational equity for men and boys
* avoiceformen.com - certainly the 'angriest' of the mainstream mrm - read avfm and note the genders of the authors. Note if the article is angry (and many are) or if it is some random commenter that is the problem

Read some of these sources and ask, how many of these issues strike a note with you, and how many are issues that you think are progressive in nature? You be surprised to learn that The American Prospect seeks to dismiss these issues.

I do not feel any empathy for old white men. They have ruled the world and destroyed it thinking they were superior. Just look at the world they have given us. They treat women and people of color like second class citizens. Women are still paid a lower wage because men do not want us to be equal. They still outnumber us in business and in our elected officials so cry me a river if they are not one of them. Maybe if they stopped being such racist, they would stop voting against their better interest, especially in the bacward redneck Deep South. They can die off with the GOP for all I care. I will not be crying for old white men.

This is not an issue of "old white men." Consider that the the next time you might be tempted to curse at some pot bellied geezer getting out of his pickup at the supermarket. Your response is exactly what the real ruling class (never including more than a tiny subset of "old white men") wants. They want you to hate "old white men" generally as much as they want most "old white men" to hate everyone else, including you.

well said, but way beyond their comprehension. The feminists likes the status quo, where feminism is the center of attention. But just like a team who focuses who puts the weakest player in the most important position, they will loose, and we are doing the same. America is living off its laurels, but anyone who is watching can see we are on the way down. Russia, China, are the next big players and they don't follow America's model for self defeat...

Wonderful Insight: "Instead of looking at the real source of their economic woes—government policies that favor the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us—ordinary white guys have lashed out instead at those below them in the social hierarchy: women and minorities."

No demographic group belongs on a pedestal based on gender or race. Entitlement is a bad way to live one's life because no one gets to define the place of "others" as if they are God themselves.

Thinking people know that the hierarchy propaganda does not make sense, because different people have various skills and competencies that have nothing to do with gender or race.

How about just being human and acknowledging one's strengths and limitations like the rest of diverse humanity?

There is nothing more annoying than to deal with a person who presumes himself or herself superior when no evidence exists to back that up.

A Wall Street investment banker, a small town shop owner and tea partier, and an outsourced, unemployed union worker are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a stack of 12 cookies from 7-11, a briefcase full of off shored cash, and a gold-edged Bible [printed in China, and shipped in from Costco with the shrink wrap and "fiction" label still on it]. The banker grabs 11 of the cookies, the briefcase, and the Bible, and on his way out, says to the tea partier, "Watch out. That union guy is going to take your cookie."

The economic downturn and the plain fact that women are gaining some power is the real reason for the men's rights dudes. They are some of the most obtuse people I've ever talked to. They don't remember what they said in comments they made 5 minutes earlier. When they are challenged they immediately use misogynist insults.

I try to talk to them but they are impossible in their anger and misogyny.

Your comment is pure drivel, you are so preoccupied with making sweeping generalities, you can't seem to comprehend that men, like women are diverse with all manner of challenges. Perhaps your statement says more about your existence and who YOU associate with, than its does about men's issues, you obviously no nothing about them. And if you talk to men, the same way you blog, it is no wonder you get "misogyny" back, because you are pushing pure misandrist. You get what you give in this words, and you are a perfect example.

This has been my experience of MRA's too. I've found an extraordinary reluctance to engage in positive organizing to solve problems. This really doesn't appear to garner much interest or traction. I've had several conversations start with some pretty fair complaints, couched in bitter resentment of some "lack" in the feminist movement. But when challenged OR invited to actually organize, most of them demanded that feminism take responsibility for these issues FOR them before they would deign to ever participate. In fact, complaining about feminism was pretty much the end of their point.

When I asked why on earth they would want feminists speaking for men's issues instead of speaking for themselves, every conversation died. I confess, I was really hoping to find more real fire in these organizations. But so far, that's not the groundswell.

Admittedly, I do not know much about men's rights groups. The first I heard of them was in an article that appeared on this site about a month ago. My issue with that article as well as this one is that they pretty much gloss over real problems. Yes, they making a passing mention of male victims of domestic violence or the achievement gap in reading and writing, but these articles just want to talk about groups that most people don't even know exist. What we are left with is a back and forth about whether some groups most people have never heard of are doing positive or negative things. What we don't talk about are the issues that receive just a passing mention on articles such as these. When is the last time you read an article on a supposedly progressive site that discussed the increase in the number of women commiting acts of domestic violence? Also, we can readily find articles that talk about the disparities between men and women in the sciences, but few if any about the disparities between boys and girls in reading and writing. As I mentioned in a previous article, the reason we don't here about these issues very much is not because they don't exist, but because of the frameworks used by the dominant ideology of the contemporary left, Multiculturalism.

Well said, but I think mixed in all of this is a good old helping on capitalism. Many of these sites live off of donations and certainly cable stations need the ad dollars, such as MSNBC. Have you ever watched a segment of MSNBC, talking all about the "war on women" idiocy, then they go to commercial where you are treated to 5 minutes of pandering to women to sell them products. Women are the shoppers in our nation, and marketers know this. Women far more than men are apt to buy into self-serving mentalities such as "being a mother is the hardest job in America", even when a women is a good mother, which today is a rarity, it does not come close to being a coal miner or road construction in Arizona...But they say it and no one dares make the correction or fear they be boycotted or branded a misogynist. We live in backward times and we will pay a price, we already are. The are numerous words in our society for being anti-female, misogamy, male-chauvinist...what is the antonym? You will not hear it in our society, even though it exits equal to misogyny.

Unfortunately, because of perceptions of privilege, men's liberation is not given enough regard. As a feminist and humanist, men's issues are very important to me, and I believe that feminists need to become aware of men's issues and be allies (just as we need men to be our allies).

However, the so-called 'Men's Rights" movement tends to have a strong anti-feminist (and at times, even misogynist) outlook. So instead of working to resolve men's oppression, these groups largely act as a mouthpiece for curtailing women's gains. A men's liberation movement would focus on the use of men as cannon fodder in wars, the lack of job safety (men die at work in much higher numbers than women), widespread violence in society that results in the untimely deaths of the victims (largely men) and, also unfortunate, high number of prison sentences for the perpetrators (largely men).

As a result of these outward oppressions, as well as cultural attitudes that decry men asking for help and expressing emotion ("boys don't cry! I'll give you something to cry about", etc), men have a shortened life expectancy.

A true gender-equality would end these and other men's oppressions. However, if you point out that men are sometimes perpetrators, rather than innocent victims, or that the oppression is instigated by society at large, and not only by "evil feminists", and that "masculinity" can and perhaps even ought to be a focal point of the investigation, the MRAs start screaming bloody murder and calling you a bigot.

That said, let's end men's oppression anyhow: if not for the MRAs, then for the pro-feminist men, the neutral men, the on-the-fence men, and the boys, brothers, husbands, lovers, etc who are all men.

You say the "men's rights movement tends to have a strong anti-feminist outlook", and you don't think the women's movement does not have a obviously strong anti-male outlook? FYI: FOUR TIMES more men commit suicide in America, that ratio is even higher amongst males 18-25, than do females in America. Where is the concern for this. But interestingly, even though far more men commit suicide, women still REPORT attempting suicide more, what does that tell you. I appreciate your seemingly empathetic approach to this topic, but this is beyond a difference of opinion, this is abuse, pure and simple. The elite of this idiot nation (because many of the men in that group are doing quite well) have totally adopted the feminists anti-male attitude and our male youth who are not "privileged" are paying the price.

Fuck MRAs. Fuck their pathetic whining. Fuck them and their unconsciously homoerotic, Limp Bizkit soundtracked synchronized-swimming victim-posturing pityfest. Seriously, fuck 'em all in the eye with a pointy stick. Give them some cheese to go along with their whine.